Technical Field
The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to systems and methods for finite analysis pre-processing.
Discussion of the Background
As part of any modern product design method, it is common practice to analyze a product before it is produced in order to predict whether it will perform according to the required design criteria. Products are commonly analyzed for conditions such as stress, strain, deflection, failure, heat and mass transfer conditions, etc. Unfortunately, the vast majority of products have geometries, materials, loads, environments, or a combination of these that are too complex to accurately model using simple, closed-form solutions. Therefore, methods have been developed to facilitate the numerical approximation of these products, thus enabling the computational simulation of their real-world performance. These include the Finite Difference, Finite Volume, and Finite Element methods, the uses of which are often very time-intensive—yet critical—in the product design process.
Modern engineering applications that facilitate the use of finite analysis pre-processing methods are currently limited to a single user and processing thread. This means that only a single engineer can work on an analysis model at a time using software that executes on a single processer, even in cases where the model is extremely large. For example, when a product is designed, a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) geometry model is delivered to a single analyst who de-features it, defines an appropriate mesh, refines the mesh, applies realistic boundary conditions, and then submits the simulation model to be solved—often to a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster or other cloud-type environment. This serial workflow may cause the single-user preparation of analysis models to become a substantial bottleneck in the product design process. Although much research has been done to expedite the overall analysis process, pre-processing environments remain oriented toward a single user.
Given the foregoing, what is needed is additional and improved systems and methods for finite analysis pre-processing, in particular, systems and methods that facilitate multiple simultaneous users. The embodiments disclosed herein were developed in response to these issues.